About Zachary Johnson

Hello! I'm a Creative Developer in Minneapolis, MN with over 20 years of experience in software engineering and leadership. I founded Zachstronaut LLC in 2011 when I began full-time freelancing in the web and game development spaces.

My specialities include networked multiplayer game development with C# / Unity, next-generation web design implementations in JavaScript, and cross-functional team management.

Highlights of My Experience

• 🎮 Launched my own game on Nintendo Switch
• 🗣 Presented my creative work at events in the US and Europe
• 🎓 Lectured on accessibility at a Big 10 University
• 📱 Programmed a #1 Hit iOS App for Cartoon Network
• 🌍 Conducted international ethnographic user research
• ❤️ Fell in love with the web after making my first site in 1996
• 🐈 Photographed myself with many random cats
• 🍩 Ate all of the donuts

Need help with a project? I have an extensive network and a passion for learning. I'm a software engineer by trade and training, but I also bring significant multi-disciplinary skills from my time working on design and User Experience (UX) teams.

Let's make something together that is both useful and entertaining!

• Contact
• Twitter
• Resume
• Artist CV

zachstronaut.com is my personal portfolio and a place for me to post articles for web professionals, software engineers, game developers, and nerds ranging in scope from the humorous to the very technical.

A garden toad once cursed me to be forever interested in the following topics:

• Making indie video games
• Low-level network I/O with TCP and UDP sockets (and Web Sockets)
• Product Design, Team Leadership, Production Flow
• Prioritization and Risk Mitigation
• Procedural generation, Noise, Cellular Automata
• Artificial Intelligence (AI), Artificial Life (AL), Emergent Behaviors
• The open-source web stack (HTML / CSS / SASS / JavaScript / TypeScript)
• Cutting edge web tech like WebGL and the latest HTML/CSS specs proposed by WHATWG/W3C
• asm.js, WebAssembly, and Emscripten
• Realtime web applications (Web Sockets and Node.js)
• Using JavaScript in all sorts of weird places
• Web best practices, e.g. Responsive Design, Progressive Enhancement, Progressive Enrichment
• Accessibility and its advocacy
• Playing Video Games, especially 8-bit and 16-bit flavors
• Framework internals and creating new frameworks
• Software Design Patterns, e.g. Promises, Factories, Model-View-Controller (MVC)
• Application Security
• Pointers and manual memory management
• Algorithms and Data Structures
• Command-Line Interfaces (CLI)
• ANSI C and Bourne Shell Scripting
• Server Daemons
• Optimization
• Fishes